Canada

The Bard exclusion isn’t due to the news thing; it’s due to Canada having privacy laws and a privacy watchdog that actually pays attention. If Google expanded to Canada, they’d have to answer a bunch of questions it appears they’d rather avoid.

Man, whatever. Fuck big corporations anyway.

Google "do no evil" my ass. Lately I've become very tired of all these tech companies who think they control the internet. That's not how internet works. I think they forgot how it really works.

And this AI shit? It's kind of disappointing. And the reason for that is because of how corporations are trying to exploit it to maximise their profits just like everything/everybody else.

Technology in general, including AI, was supposed to make our lives easier. Make us need to work less to produce just as much or more. The goal was to have a utopia where nobody would have to work anymore and technology would take care of everything for us. But NOOOOOOO. We're still working harder than ever just trying to get by, and if we can be replace by technology, then too fucking bad. You end up poor, homeless and you're told by the same wealthy people who fired you and who are benefiting from technology to "pick yourself up by your bootstraps".

Finally some privacy laws working in our favor.

That sounds like a good thing.

I see no problem with this.

Don't care. Google is also being a baby and blocking Canadians from Canadian news.

Perhaps we should all move away from Google? They clearly can't be trusted when their response to pay Canadian journalists for rehosting their content is "nah, we instead are going to block Canadian news".

I don't think it's unfair to pay someone when you're rehosting their stuff or driving away clicks by giving an article summary. Especially when there's no Google without links. Just like Reddit doesn't work without users submitting content. Not to mention it's bold to play this game when there are plenty of Google alternatives now.

Barred from Bard!

Canada has long been excluded from a lot of newly releases products from a lot of American companies.

Most of the time it's like they simply forget we exist. Or they don't want to comply with our stronger consumer protection regulations, or labelling laws or anything else.

Even though this may be part of their whining about the latest law, it could also just be part of that long pattern.

Why would anyone give a shit whether Canada gets included in Google’s ai? They just foist this new shit that is effectively useless to the average person other than making shitty “art” and cheating on essay writing. They use it however they want while skirting copyright laws and trawling any data they can get their hands on.

Does anybody really think that ai under google is doing anything other than data-mining to sell advertising? Ai in it’s current form isn’t helping anyone except corporations and the billionaire class and almost everyone would be better off without it.

As someone who has had to actively contact an AI company and expressly deny use of digital images on our website, I'm confident there are no boundaries with what they scrape from the Internet. They don't have any respect and slurp up everything in their path, which unfortunately leads to only one possible outcome - a culturally desensitised dataset. It will become the 'neutral average' of the internet, banal in many ways and biased in others. Don't expect anything that resembles Canadian sentiment to come out of any non-Canadian AI (Same problem but different locale for me - UK/Eire).

Any that's before it starts eating it's own tail - there's pictures of generative images where they fed data back in, and it's as interesting as it is amusing and horrific. Keeping the data clean is an unsolved problem because it's hard to differentiate organic and synthetic sources.

All of this pales into insignificance with (as far as I know) all AI lacking the ability to admit when it doesn't know. It just makes it up from nothing.

I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, etc. I haven't found a use for any of it yet (software engineering) where I trust it enough and the experiments I've run have proved this, for me personally. It's a novelty, a toy, it will evolve. As for the Online News Act, I'm conflicted. I believe in a free and open Internet, which goes against both restrictive legislation and against the likes of Google and Meta who abuse their position in the online landscape. My instinct is I'd rather have the Online News Act than Bard as the publisher should own their content, so good luck with that.

No loss for me. I don't give a rat's ass about AI chatbots. And I myself have excluded Google from my online activities. I use Debian Linux. My phone has LineageOS without Google Play Services -- instead I use apps from f-droid, including OsmAnd~ for mapping. I never use Google search (I rely on DuckDuckGo). Any YouTube videos I may wish to view I use either FreeTube or Invidious (the latter via the Firefox addon LibRedirect). For translation, it's LibreTranslate. If I wish to see news articles I'll go directly to media sites such as The Star, The Globe and Mail, CBC, or via the news search on DuckDuckGo. Anyone who is still allowing themselves to be a product of Google is misguided, as far as I'm concerned.

Too bad, they'll lose even more marketshare in the AI business on top of losing in the search business.